Levy, a professor of political theory at McGill University, in Montreal, ended up designing a class structure that proved hugely popular with his students and gave him the best teaching evaluations of his career. He did it, he says, by creating a tech-free classroom and focusing on in-class, structured essays. While it was a lot of work for him and his three teaching assistants, Levy says, the setup assured students that they were competing on a level playing field, and the assignments developed their critical-writing skills.
Levy wrote about his approach in a post on Bluesky in response to a viral New York magazine cover story called “Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through College.” The takeaway from the article: Students are using and abusing AI at a rampant rate, and professors can’t trust anything they produce.
Levy disagrees: “I simply do not believe that this is unsolvable or that students don’t care about actually learning to do their work,” he wrote. I caught up with Levy by phone to hear more about his approach, as well as about his philosophy on learning.
As it turns out, Levy is clear-eyed about students’ willingness to cheat. But they often do it, he says, out of panic. With AI, for example, there’s the stress of feeling like you need to use it because everyone else is.
“Students need to be assured that everyone else is going to be playing by the rules,” he says. “They don’t want to be the last sucker who’s not using generative AI for their writing.”
Students also cheat, he notes, when they’re in a bind. They waited too long to start that paper, and it’s due in two days — or the next morning.
Mitigating the everyone-is-doing-it impulse and the last-minute impulse, he says, pushed him “in the direction of more in-class writing over the course of the semester, to try to build skills and build confidence” before assigning a take-home paper at the end of the semester.
Each in-class writing assignment focused on a certain skill, he notes: Present this author’s argument. Critique the argument. Put these two authors in dispute with one another and pick a side.
“There’s a limit to what you can do in an hour of handwritten work,” he acknowledges, “but you can do something. And if you’ve done this four or five times over the course of the semester with some feedback, hopefully you’ve learned something.”
It’s not costless, he says. Handwritten feedback on every paper takes time. And take-home papers are ultimately better, he notes, because you have longer to think, write, and revise.
“I don’t have any sense of what a liberal-arts education is going to look like long term, if we’re so profoundly limited in our ability to ask students to write and edit and revise papers,” Levy says. “But this was part of a first effort, and I have to say that I was very, very pleased at the enthusiasm that students showed for it.”
Despite some initial misgivings, he says, students said they really liked the no-tech rule for class. They valued taking notes by hand. And they appreciated the attention paid to their authentic writing. Students, he says, shared a sense that “we’re all doing the same thing here, and that we’re doing this honestly.”
The New York magazine article, by contrast, “adopted the stance, ‘We’re all doomed because the students are all desperately lazy and dishonest, and they just really want to cheat,’” says Levy. “I find that outrageously offensive as a teacher. I believe in our students, and I believe in what students want out of a college education.”
That’s why he chose to encourage and equip students in advance to make the right decisions. As for those final papers, which students did on their own, he can’t prove that none used AI. But Levy did his best to create prompts that AI could not hack easily, to encourage students to do the right thing. He also talked at length to students about how the papers were designed to build on the skills they had been learning all semester. And he made his TAs available to talk to any students who needed support in those final two weeks.
Judging from the course evaluations, Levy thinks students approached their papers authentically and felt prepared for the challenge. “The mood they expressed about the class was an enthusiastic one that said, Yes, it worked. We were able to turn those skills and turn those argument structures into papers as much as possible.”
Have you created a classroom environment that discourages AI use and encourages authentic work? If so, write to me at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com and your story may appear in a future newsletter.
AI-related resources
Enhancing STEM Higher Education with Artificial Intelligence provides guidance for instructors who want to integrate AI into course design and use it to improve their own productivity, among other things. It was produced by the University of Texas at Austin’s office of STEM-education excellence. “There are some wonderful examples of incorporating AI to both lighten task burden and engage students creatively,” writes Kristen (KP) Procko, faculty director for innovative scholarship and an associate professor of molecular bioscience. “We assembled tools developed by each faculty member into an open education resource, which we hope may guide and inspire other faculty.”
Making AI Generative for Higher Education: Adoption and Challenges Among Instructors and Researchers describes faculty instructional and research practices with generative AI, based on 246 interviews conducted at 19 colleges and universities. It was written by Claire Baytas and Dylan Ruediger of Ithaka S+R. I wrote about the Ithaka project in my recent story: Should College Graduates Be AI Literate?
Looking for dynamic profs
Do you know of a particularly dynamic professor who teaches one of your college’s most in-demand courses? We’re looking for a few of those people for The Chronicle’s podcast, College Matters, which is running a summer series focused on popular courses.
If you know of a great candidate — or you are one yourself — please fill out this form to tell us. Our colleagues have just a few slots to fill and are looking for pitches that wow them.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
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